Today in Fascism




Race can be discussed as a social reality with a biological component. The consequences of that social reality have been very serious, however, and continue to be so. So are the consequences of the fallacies surrounding race. Among these fallacies are that race was the basis of slavery, and that racism is the main reason for black-white differences in incomes and in all the other aspects of life that depend on income. Moreover, there is often an implicit assumption that racism and discrimination are so closely linked that they go up or down together, when in fact as we shall see, some times and places with more racism have been known to have less discrimination— and discrimination can exist without racism. Lurking in the background of some discussions of race is the question whether races differ in innate intelligence, a question that has generated fallacies among those on both sides of this issue.

It has often been common to compare a given group, such as blacks in the United States, with the national average and regard the differences as showing a special peculiarity of the group being compared, or a special peculiarity of policies or attitudes towards that group. But either conclusion can be misleading when the national average itself is just an amalgamation of wide variations among many ethnic, regional and other groups. While the black and white populations of the United States have long differed in various economic and social variables— in income, years of schooling, life expectancy, unemployment rates, crime rates, and scores on a variety of tests— so have other groups differed widely from one another and from the national average in countries around the world.

One of the most overlooked, but important, differences among groups are their ages. The median age of black Americans is five years younger than the median age (35) of the American population as a whole, but blacks are by no means unique in having a median age different from the national average or from the ages of other groups. Among Asian Americans, the median age ranges from 43 for Japanese Americans to 24 for Americans of Cambodian ancestry to 16 for those of Hmong ancestry. Incomes are highly correlated with age, with young people usually beginning their working lives earning much less than older and more experienced workers. Therefore gross comparisons of incomes among racial or ethnic groups can be misleading when the median ages of groups can differ by a decade or even a quarter of a century. Nor are age differences the only differences among Asian Americans. While 61 percent of Japanese Americans were born in the United States, less than a third of the Asian Americans of Chinese, Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean, or Asian Indian ancestry were.5 Native-born citizens are obviously more familiar with the opportunities available in the society and better able to take advantage of those opportunities.

Educational differences are likewise as great among American ethnic minorities as they are between minorities and the larger population. Although Hispanics have overtaken blacks numerically as part of the population, blacks still receive more doctorates than Hispanics. While the Asian American population is only a fraction of the size of either the black or the Hispanic population, Asian Americans receive more doctorates than Hispanics and nearly as many as blacks. In short, an even distribution of groups is by no means common, whether in age, education, or other characteristics.

The United States is by no means unique in the nature or magnitude of economic or social differences among racial or ethnic groups. Income differences between the Chinese and Malay populations of Malaysia, for example, have long been greater than income differences between blacks and whites in the United States.7 So have economic differences between different tribes in Nigeria or between Asians and Africans in East Africa.

Various groups around the world have differed in everything from alcohol consumption per capita to IQs. Indeed, differences have been the norm and identical economic or social outcomes have been the exception. That is why singling out any given group for comparison with the national average can be misleading if it suggests that the situation of the group in question is peculiar, rather than being part of a worldwide pattern of wide variations from group to group. This is not to say that intergroup differences don't matter. Some of these differences matter greatly.
What are the reasons behind these disparities? Perhaps a more fundamental question might be: What reason was there to expect these groups to be the same in the first place? Geography, demography, history and culture have all differed among groups in countries around the world


From the Great Thomas Sowell's Economic Facts and Fallacies
 
The wheels of justice grind slowly, and the R E Lee statue in Charlottesville will finally be coming down.

Perhaps the biggest fallacy about the history of racial and ethnic minorities is that the passage of time reduces the hostility and discrimination they face. In many countries, minorities have faced greater hostility and discrimination in a later period than in earlier periods. In other countries, the reverse has been true. But the passage of time alone does not automatically produce either result.......... Within an even shorter span of time, the island nation of Sri Lanka, off the coast of India, went from being a country whose good relations between majority and minority had become a model for intergroup harmony to one with a decades-long civil war taking tens of thousands of lives. During the first half of the twentieth century, there was not a single riot between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority. But, during the second half of that century, there were many such riots, marked by unspeakable atrocities, and ultimately degenerating into a civil war that was still not completely ended as the twenty-first century dawned.

Other such examples could be found in many countries and in many periods of history. In Bohemia, Germans and Czechs co-existed peacefully for centuries, until the rise of Czech nationalism, climaxed by the creation of the new nation of Czechoslovakia after the First World War, led to discrimination against Germans and then to a German backlash that led ultimately to the Munich crisis of 1938, when the Czechs were forced to relinquish the predominantly German Sudetenland to Nazi Germany. After Germany later took over all of Czechoslovakia, the Germans in that country then joined in the Nazis' persecution of Czechs. After the defeat of Germany in World War II, Germans in Czechoslovakia were expelled by the millions, often under brutal conditions that led to many deaths.

Such retrogressions in intergroup relations were not unknown in the United States, though not usually to such extremes. The predominantly German Jewish population of the United States was far better assimilated and accepted before the arrival of millions of unassimilated Eastern European Jews in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries led to a social backlash against all Jews that resulted in restrictions against Jews in places where such restrictions had not existed before. Black Americans, meanwhile, were far better accepted in Northern cities at the end of the nineteenth century than they would be in the first half of the twentieth century, after massive migrations of less assimilated Southern blacks caused a similar backlash that created new restrictions against all blacks. Northern cities in which blacks had lived largely dispersed among whites saw in the early twentieth century the rigid residential segregation patterns that would create the black ghettoes which quickly became the norm.

It would be as fallacious to depict racial retrogression as an inevitable result of the passage of time as to depict racial progress as something happening automatically over time. Much racial progress occurred in the second half of the twentieth century in the United States, especially for blacks. Since this was not something that happened automatically, it is important to understand the causes and the timing. It is especially important to scrutinize the evidence because many individuals and organizations have a vested interest in claiming credit for progress, and incessantly repeated claims can sometimes be mistaken for facts.

Progress and retrogression are not always separated in different eras. There can be much progress in some respects during the same time when there is retrogression in other respects. That was especially true among black Americans in the second half of the twentieth century.

Before the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the racial segregation of schools was required in all the Southern states that had formed the Confederacy, as well as in Missouri, Texas, Oklahoma, and the District of Columbia— and racial segregation of the schools was permitted in Wyoming, Arizona, and New Mexico. All such laws were nullified by the Supreme Court decision and, over the next decades, the practice of racial segregation in the schools was dismantled. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed racial segregation in both public and private enterprises and institutions, and forbade employment discrimination as well. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed practices which had disenfranchised black voters in the South and the 1970s saw "affirmative action" take on the meaning of preferential hiring of minority workers.

These major legal landmarks of the civil rights revolution have often been credited with the economic and political advances of the black population. Certainly the Voting Rights Act was responsible for a huge increase in black voting in the South and the subsequent skyrocketing of the number of black elected officials throughout the region. But history tells a very different story as regards the economic advancement of blacks.

The percentage of black families with incomes below the poverty line fell most sharply between 1940 and 1960, going from 87 percent to 47 percent over that span, before either the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and well before the 1970s, when "affirmative action" evolved into numerical "goals" or "quotas." While the downward trend in poverty continued, the pace of that decline did not accelerate after these legal landmarks but in fact slackened. The poverty rate declined from 47 percent to 30 percent during the decade of the 1960s and then only from 30 percent to 29 percent between 1970 and 1980. However, much credit has been claimed for the civil rights laws of the 1960s or the War on Poverty programs of that same decade, the hard facts show that blacks' rise out of poverty was more dramatic before any of these government actions got under way.

There was a similar historical trend as regards the rise of blacks into professional, managerial, and other high-level occupations. The number of blacks in white collar occupations, managerial and administrative occupations doubled between 1940 and 1960, and nearly doubled in professional occupations. Meanwhile, the number of blacks who were farm workers in 1960 was only one-fourth of the number who were in 1940. These favorable trends continued after 1960 but did not originate in the 1960s. As regards the group preferences and quotas— "affirmative action"— which began in the 1970s, they produced little or no effect on the relative sizes of black and white incomes. The median black household income was 60.9 percent of the median white household income in 1970— and never rose above that, or as high as that, throughout the decade of the 1970s. As of 1980, median black household income was 57.6 percent of median white household income.

The facts are clear but the fallacies persist that it was the civil rights laws, the "war on poverty" programs of the 1960s, and affirmative action which caused the rise of blacks out of poverty and their ascent into middle class occupations.


The above from Thomas Sowell reminds me of how much credit is given to NPI's and vaccines in the SCAMDEMIC. The fallacy of NPI's and vaccines persist despite hard historical data to the contrary.
 

In addition to its own evils during its own time, slavery has generated fallacies that endure into our time, confusing many issues today. The distinguished historian Daniel J. Boorstin said something that was well known to many scholars, but utterly unknown to many among the general public, when he pointed out that, with the mass transportation of Africans in bondage to the Western Hemisphere, "Now for the first time in Western history, the status of slave coincided with a difference of race."

For centuries before, Europeans had enslaved other Europeans, Asians had enslaved other Asians and Africans had enslaved other Africans. Only in the modern era was there both the wealth and the technology to organize the mass transportation of people across an ocean, either as slaves or as free immigrants. Nor were Europeans the only ones to transport masses of enslaved human beings from one continent to another. North Africa's Barbary Coast pirates alone captured and enslaved at least a million Europeans from 1500 to 1800, carrying more Europeans into bondage in North Africa than there were Africans brought in bondage to the United States and the American colonies from which it was formed. Moreover, Europeans were still being bought and sold in the slave markets of the Islamic world, decades after blacks were freed in the United States.

Slavery was a virtually universal institution in countries around the world and for thousands of years of recorded history. Indeed, archaeological evidence suggests that human beings learned to enslave other human beings before they learned to write. One of the many fallacies about slavery— that it was based on race— is sustained by the simple but pervasive practice of focussing exclusively on the enslavement of Africans by Europeans, as if this were something unique, rather than part of a much larger worldwide human tragedy. Racism grew out of African slavery, especially in the United States, but slavery preceded racism by thousands of years. Europeans enslaved other Europeans for centuries before the first African was brought in bondage to the Western Hemisphere.

The brutal reality is that vulnerable people were usually taken advantage of wherever it was feasible to take advantage of them, regardless of what race or color they were.
The rise of nation states put armies and navies around some people but it was not equally possible to establish nation states in all parts of the world, partly because of geography. Where large populations had no army or navy to protect them, they fell prey to enslavers, whether in Africa, Asia or along unguarded stretches of European coastlines where Barbary pirates made raids, usually around the Mediterranean but sometimes as far away as England or Iceland. The enormous concentration of writings and of the media in general on slavery in the Western Hemisphere, or in the United States in particular, creates a false picture which makes it difficult to understand even the history of slavery in the United States.

While slavery was readily accepted as a fact of life all around the world for centuries on end, there was never a time when slavery could get that kind of universal acceptance in the United States, founded on a principle of freedom, with which slavery was in such obvious and irreconcilable contradiction. Slavery was under ideological attack from the first draft of the Declaration of Independence and a number of Northern states banned slavery in the years immediately following independence. Even in the South, the ideology of freedom was not wholly without effect, as tens of thousands of slaves were voluntarily set free after Americans gained their own freedom from England.

Most Southern slaveowners, however, were determined to hold on to their slaves and, for that, some defense was necessary against the ideology of freedom and the widespread criticisms of slavery that were its corollary. Racism became that defense. Such a defense was unnecessary in unfree societies, such as that of Brazil, which imported more slaves than the United States but developed no such virulent levels of racism as that of the American South. Outside Western civilization, no defense of slavery was necessary, as non-Western societies saw nothing wrong with it. Nor was there any serious challenge to slavery in Western civilization prior to the eighteenth century.


Racism became a justification of slavery in a society where it could not be justified otherwise— and centuries of racism did not suddenly vanish with the abolition of the slavery that gave rise to it. But the direction of causation was the direct opposite of what is assumed by those who depict the enslavement of Africans as being a result of racism. Nevertheless, racism became one of the enduring legacies of slavery. How much of it continues to endure and in what strength today is something that can be examined and debated. But many other things that are considered to be legacies of slavery can be tested empirically, rather than being accepted as foregone conclusions.
Mr. Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies



 
But more to the point of your fallacious post

The history of crime and violence among blacks contradicts many widespread beliefs about the causes of that crime and violence. Poverty, unemployment, and racial discrimination are frequently listed among the prime "root causes" of riots and other criminality among blacks. Many are so convinced of this that they see no reason to examine the factual historical record.

Crime among black Americans, like crime among white Americans, was declining for years prior to the decade of the 1960s, with its landmark civil rights laws and its "war on poverty" programs.
But it was during the 1960s that crime rates began skyrocketing among both blacks and whites, and it was precisely after the historic civil rights laws were passed that blacks began rioting in cities across the country. Within days of the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the first of hundreds of riots that would rack cities across the country over the next four years began in the black neighborhood of Los Angeles known as Watts. These riots did not begin where blacks were poorest or most oppressed, which was still the South. Indeed, Southern cities seldom suffered the riots that struck many Northern cities and devastated many black neighborhoods in those cities. Thirty-four people died in the Watts riots but 43 were killed when blacks rioted in Detroit two years later.

Although Detroit had the worst of the riots that struck virtually every Northern city during the latter part of the 1960s, the poverty rate among Detroit's black population was only half of that of blacks nationwide, its homeownership rate among blacks was the highest in the country, and its unemployment rate was 3.4 percent— lower than that among whites nationwide. Detroit did not have a massive riot because it was an economic disaster area. It became an economic disaster area after the riots, as did black neighborhoods in many other cities across the country. Moreover, riot-torn neighborhoods in these cities remained disaster areas for decades thereafter, as businesses became reluctant to locate there, reducing access to both jobs and places to shop, and both black and white middle class people left for the suburbs.

Whatever the causes of these waves of riots, whether as background factors or as immediate precipitating incidents, they were clearly not the factors that have been repeated endlessly but fallaciously. The worse ghetto riots occurred precisely at those times and places where the things that were supposed to prevent riots were most prevalent, including officials promoting welfare state policies and restraining the police. Conversely, riots were least destructive, and sometimes non-existent, in places and times where officials took an opposite view.
As already noted, Southern cities were far less often struck by urban riots. Among Northern cities, Chicago was one of the cities least affected by ghetto riots. It had no such riots in 1967. The following year, when riots swept across the country in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Chicago's Mayor Richard J. Daley issued a highly publicized "shoot to kill" order to his police that was denounced by many, but deaths from riots in Chicago were a fraction of what they were in cities like Detroit where more humane and sympathetic expressions were used and the police were restrained. Nationally, the most urban ghetto riots occurred during the Johnson administration but there was not one major urban riot during the entire eight years of the Reagan administration. Yet such hard facts did not make a dent in fashionable beliefs, then or now. Both politicians and activists have a vested interest in racial fallacies, which attribute the advancement of blacks to politicians and activists, and blame others for the retrogressions.
 
What I remember from first grade --

Reading about Dick and Jane
The alphabet song (it took some time to realize that there was not another N between Y and Z) and how to print all the letters
Addition up to 10 + 10 (9 + 9 was much harder - where did that 1 come from?)
Identify at least 8 colors, plus black, white, and brown.
The Pledge of Allegiance - then they added "under God" so we had to start over in second grade*

Now Tucker Carlson has admitted that he had trouble with first grade so his father hired him a tutor.

*I'm a sort of Anabaptist about the Pledge - I don't think children should be taught it until they are old enough to understand what it means.
 
The citizens of Charlottesville wanted the statues gone when trump’s “fine people” came along, the blood and soil, Jews will not replace us, tiki torch carriers from other places that demanded their symbols of hate be preserved.
Hate replacement. Who knew?
 
What I remember from first grade --

Reading about Dick and Jane
The alphabet song (it took some time to realize that there was not another N between Y and Z) and how to print all the letters
Addition up to 10 + 10 (9 + 9 was much harder - where did that 1 come from?)
Identify at least 8 colors, plus black, white, and brown.
The Pledge of Allegiance - then they added "under God" so we had to start over in second grade*

Now Tucker Carlson has admitted that he had trouble with first grade so his father hired him a tutor.

*I'm a sort of Anabaptist about the Pledge - I don't think children should be taught it until they are old enough to understand what it means.
You and Tucker go to the same school?
 
I suppose Representative Stefanik will be having words with the staffer who caused this contradictory statement to appear on her twitter account (or maybe she doesn't understand it?) --

 
I suppose Representative Stefanik will be having words with the staffer who caused this contradictory statement to appear on her twitter account (or maybe she doesn't understand it?) --

That’s hilarious and typical. Stubborn ignorance exemplified in hypocrisy. I remember the plumber and his flailing attempts to label anything he didn’t agree with as “commie” regardless of it’s true nature. It’s just easier for them that way. No middle ground, all or nothing.
 
Meanwhile, the FASCIST are panicked because of this chart -- yes, this chart:

Daily Confirmed COVID deaths.png



Did you realize that was the extent of what we're facing? That little bit of nothingness at the end of the chart there?
 
FASCISM in APRIL 2021. I like the name of this thread. It's a great place to highlight CA.'s fascism given an IFR of .000014 vs. .000011 for Texas. Espola's yellow warning light comes to mind.

Here we go, courtesy of the great Ian Miller (@ianmSC on Twitter).

Let's start with California and Texas. Remember when Gavin Newsom, governor of California, described the decision to drop the Texas mask mandate as "absolutely reckless," and then continued with his own crazy policies of closing even outdoor dining and then had similar or worse results than Texas for seven weeks? I'm sure this was all over the news, right?
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I went to the grocery this morning store to stock up Bruddah. Something strange in the air and fear in the eyes of most folks like nothing before. Everyone had a mask on except the workers, which was the opposite when hey first came out with the two week flat the curve program back in March 2020. 18 months later, the checker told me she is not wanting to put the mask on ever again. She is so cool and has the best smile at the store. I told her she makes my morning with her outlook with life. Always smiling :) I had a great talk with her and she said she will go on leave if mask is forced. Having a Husker Boss Man or a Messy type asshat forcing that mask on 8 hours a day is going to bite them in the ass later, MOO!!! Horrible bosses, Husker: "get the mask on or your fired"
Worker: "But Boss, you told me if I got the two jabs I could be free of the damn mask."
Husker: "STFU and put the mask on fool." "Be happy you got a job plus free jabs. Also, booster jab is next and the Omega strain is in the 5th wave."

Next Day

Worker ((Calls Boss)): "I have a fever and I can;t come in."
Husker: WTF
 
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